Musings
Elisabeth Plank (harp)
rec. 2021, Ziersdorf, Austria
Genuin GEN22772 [66]

In her ‘Preliminary remark’ which opens the booklet accompanying this CD, Elisabeth Plank writes “My interpretation of a piece usually starts with its background, and often I find the starting point of my research in the dedication of the work. Over the years I have gathered together pieces which, because of the story leading to their composition, can be seen as musical love letters. For this CD I have chosen a number of these works and, each one tells a different story”.

These musical ‘love letters’ are ‘addressed’ by a composer to a woman who can reasonably be called a Muse. Muse-figures, women or men in whom artists find creative stimulation or inspiration are recurrent features across a variety of art forms. In literature (especially poetry), one might think of Dante and Beatrice Portinari, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, Yeats and Maud Gonne, Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval; in the visual arts, Manet and Victorine Meurent, Rodin and Camille Claudel or Picasso and a whole series of ‘muses’ (!), who included Fernande Olivier, Olga Khoklova, Marie-Thérése Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot and Jacqueline Rocq.

When it comes to music, the situation is rather different. There are at least two kinds of relationships between a composer and a ‘muse’. One which one could say is closer to the examples cited above from poetry and the visual arts and one which is exclusive to the world of music. In all but two of the cases on this disc the dedicatee was a female harpist, i.e. a potential performer/interpreter of the composer’s work; the two exceptions are, obviously enough, the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No.8 and the composition by Alfred Zamora. Zamara came from a distinguished musical family. His father, Antonio/Anton (1823-c.1901) was born in Milan, but established himself in Vienna, to where he relocated in 1842, becoming a member of the Vienna Court Orchestra in the same year and later Professor of Harp at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in the city. His son Alfred was later to occupy the identical positions. Alfred Zamara (1863-1940) fell in love with a Croatian young woman, Katharina Radakovich (born c. 1874) early in the 1890s, and the two married in 1894. Alfred soon dedicated a piece, Mes premieres pensées. Romance to his “épouse chérie”, and she must surely have been delighted on hearing her husband perform it, since it is full of intense emotion; while its melodic lines are fairly simple, Zamara creates a rich texture of varied harmonic colours. Elisabeth Plank herself was born in Vienna and is heir to the great Viennese tradition of the harp, in which the Zamaras, father and son, were important figures, and it seems entirely fitting that she should be responsible for the world premiere recording of this love-filled piece.

By the very nature of the various arts there is no related situation where poets or painters and their muses are concerned – Keats didn’t expect Fanny Brawne to give public readings of his poems, nor (although she was an actress and a dancer) was Haitian Jeanne Duval expected to offer interpretations of Baudelaire’s poetry.

Elisabeth Plank opens the disc with a performance of Fauré’s Une Chatelaine en sa tour. The piece carries as its title the second line of Paul Verlaine’s poem ‘Une sainte en son aureole’, collected in the poet’s collection La bonne chanson (1872). Fauré also published a setting of the same poem in song-cycle La bonne chanson, Op.61 (1894). I quote the poem in the translation by Richard Stokes (originally published in A French Song Companion, Oxford, 2000), which appears on the website of the Oxford International Song Festival:

A Saint in her halo,
A Châtelaine in her tower,
All that human words contain
Of grace and love;

The golden note of a horn
In forests far away,
Blended with the tender pride
Of noble Ladies of long ago;

And then – the rare charm
Of fresh, triumphant smile,
Flowering in swan-like innocence
And the blushes of a child-bride;

A nacreous sheen of white and pink,
A sweet patrician harmony –
All these things I see and hear
In her Carolingian name.

This beautiful  poem’s highlights the limits of words in the expression of a woman’s beauty; several of Verlaine’s images consequently hint at music as possibly more suited to the task, as in “The golden note of a horn / in forests far away (La note d’or que fait entendre / Un cor dans le lointain des bois” and the last stanza’s reference to “A sweet patrician harmony” (Un doux accord patricien). Fauré’s music evokes much of what Verlaine’s words can only allude to, in a composition in which an opening in A minor evolves, through some dance-like rhythms, to a rather triumphant statement, before dying away gently into a kind of dream of eternity. Kahn was a beautiful young woman in her late twenties when Fauré (in his late 70s) wrote this piece for her. The age difference by no means made him immune to her beauty and charm or, just as important, to her exceptional skill as a harpist. There is no reason to believe that the composer’s feeling were more than admiration. In the years before Fauré composed this piece, she had made transcriptions for solo harp of a number of Fauré’s works, including ‘Le Jardin de Dolly’ and the Berceuse, op. 18.  She premiered Une Châtelaine en sa tour in November  of 1918 at the Société nationale de Musique in Paris. She had earlier, in 1907, been the harpist in the premiere of Ravel’s Introduction et allegro pour harpe, flûte, clarinette et quatuor.

Earlier, I noted that the Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 was ‘obviously’ not dedicated to a specific female harpist, yet it might be thought of as a piece of music inspired by a ‘muse’. It has often been assumed that the movement was intended by Mahler as an affirmation of his love for his future wife Alma Maria Schindler. She and Mahler first met in 1901 and married in 1902 – 1901/2 being the period in which Mahler wrote his Symphony No.5. The Adagietto is, of course, the fifth movement of the symphony, scored for Strings and harp only. It is heard here in a beautiful transcription for solo harp by Elisabeth Plank, which certainly seems to express great love. Seen in this light, the relationship between creative artist and muse in the case of the Adagietto is like that between, say, Dante and Beatrice.  

To my mind, the most memorable tracks on this album are Fauré’s Une Châtelaine en sa tour and Alfred Zamara’s Mes premières pensées. Romance. Certainly, these are the two tracks I have played most often. 

But there is much more top-class music making on the album, as in Dussek’s Sonata III in G major, from his Six Sonatas for the Harp (1799), dedicated to Anne-Marie Krumpholtz. This brilliant harpist had studied the harp with Johann Baptiste Krumpholz and married him in 1778, aged just 16, after the death of his first wife. In the 1790s she was a star of the Parisian music scene. Dussek’s two-movement Sonata draws some fine playing from Elisabeth Plank, not least in the beautiful way she articulates Dussek’s melodies, precisely but never pedantically.  A different aspect of her abilities is evident in the power she brings to Elias Parish Alvars’ Scenes of my Youth, particularly its second movement, ‘The Gipsies March’.

In Spohr’s Variations pour la harpe, sur l’air “Je suis encore dans mon printemps, 

Plank delineates the variations with delightful clarity (the ‘air’ is by Étienne Nicolas Méhul).

Engelbert Humperdinck’s Nachtstück was written for the harpist Brunhilde Böhner (1862-1948) who was based in Cologne, as a teacher at the Conservatory, where Humperdinck also taught. In his valuable booklet essay ‘Inspired by a muse’, British harpist Alexander Rider tells us that Humperdinck and Böhner “developed a deep mutual affection”, though “Their love was eventually thwarted by logistical matters” (a somewhat enigmatic phrase). Rider describes Nachtstück as “one of the few true works of German Romanticism to exist for the harp”.

I have no negative remarks to offer on this richly enjoyable album by a very gifted young harpist. The playing is outstanding and the recorded sound excellent, while the programme has genuine significance, being more than merely the sum of its parts. I close, rather by wondering whether Elisabeth Plank has coined a new English noun – ‘Musings’ (things dedicated to a muse) – by analogy with words such as awakenings, bindings, recordings or darlings ?

Glyn Pursglove

Contents
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) 
Une Châtelaine en sa tour,  op. 110 (1918)
Louis Spohr (1784-1849)
Variations pour la harpe, sur l’air “Je suis encore dans mon printemps. Op.36 (1807)
Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921)
Nachtstück (1881)
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Adagietto, from Symphony No. 5 (1901-2)*
Arr. Elisabeth Plank
Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Pittoresco, op. 22, no. 7
Prelude op.12, no.7 (1906-1913)
Piece for harp ‘Eleonora’
Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812)
Sonata III in G major, from Six Sonatas for the Harp, C 162 (1799)
Alfred Zamara (1863-1940)
Mes premiers pensées. Romance (1897)*
Elias Parish Alvars (1808-1849)
Scenes of my Youth: Grande Fantaisie pour la harpe, op.75 (1845)*
*World premiere recordings.

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